Pygmalion's Figure: Reading Old French Romance (EDWARD C ARMSTRONG MONOGRAPHS ON MEDIEVAL LITERATURE)

This book explores issues of interpretation in Old French romance of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, a tradition whose influence is formative in the development of European narrative fiction. I attempt to relate certain features of the art of memory, a rhetorical art depending on images and the interpretation of images, to these issues of interpretation underlying romance. My main purpose is to elucidate the nature of this imaginative experience as it governs the composition and reception of the literary text, as well as the relationship between the individual romances that I treat and the literary tradition.